


Ghost

by lurkinglurkerwholurks



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Paranormal, Post-Batman: A Death in the Family, no editing we typo like mne
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27690032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurkinglurkerwholurks/pseuds/lurkinglurkerwholurks
Summary: Here is what he knew: His name was Jason Peter Todd. He was the son of a man he hated, a woman he mourned, a woman he regretted, and a man he missed. He was from a city of night. He had died. And he had come back wrong.
Comments: 75
Kudos: 205





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Friggin' Tumblr. I saw a post about a post-Ethiopia Jason with a paranormal slant and my brain went haywire. I HAVE OTHER THINGS TO WRITE. I have no idea where this is going. I have no idea when it will be updated. But there's more to come.

The al Ghuls did not have him.

Did not have, present tense.

Had had, past tense, messy, ugly. 

Had had him for a hot minute, a burning smear of fear and disorientation that left a stain on him every time he revisited it.

Maybe if they had kept him, things would have turned out differently.

Not maybe. He knows they would have, though he didn’t find out until much later. A visitor from another universe told him, an impossibility to even think, except for the fact that his entire life was an impossibility.

In the face of a dead boy walking, what was one interplanar catch-up?

But all that was to come later, much later, as was the knowledge of what had happened to him.

What he did know came in pieces. Scorched paper memories of sound and sight and feel, fragmented and jumbled into an unreadable mess. He had spent hours in the dark, sifting, sorting, lining up each scrap into neat little rows, trying to divine meaning like a scrier over scattered chicken bones.

Here is what he knew: His name was Jason Peter Todd. He was the son of a man he hated, a woman he mourned, a woman he regretted, and a man he missed. He was from a city of night. He had died. And he had come back wrong.

That had been a source of pain for him early on, the certainty that he was wrong, down to his unbroken bones. He had known from the moment he opened his eyes and screamed into the glowing abyss of the desert cave. It was a terrible thing, to feel as if life and death both had rejected you.

He was used to the wrongness now, almost. He tried not to look too long into the mirror, or listen too closely to what spoke in the still of the night. He stuck to cold and dreary places, because it was easier to pretend that his chest was cold, his fingertips numb, his breath chilled by the world around him than by something fundamentally broken inside. And if others sometimes seemed to stare through him, well, he had been trained in stealth, hadn’t he?

 _I am human,_ he would tell himself, unsure if he believed it. _I am Jason._

He was Jason, whoever Jason was now, but only some of the time. Sometimes he wrapped Jason carefully in newspaper dated three years old and tucked that boy deep in his cavernous, frigid chest, like a doll in a locked trunk. It was safer that way, for both of them, to protect Jason when Ghost needed to work.

He didn’t pick the name. They did. _Them._ The normal people out there, or what passed for normal in his world. He tried not to think too hard about the name either. He didn’t think he was a ghost. Ghosts were incorporeal, and he wasn’t. Zombie didn’t seem right either. Or vampire. Or spectre. Or revenant or mummy or lich. Or maybe he was. One of them or all of them or something else he couldn’t find in books.

They didn’t mean it that way, anyways. All they meant—he thought; he’d never stuck around to ask—was that he was very quiet and very, very good at what he did. Of course he was. His training never left, not really. He might have left pieces of himself splattered across a cold cement floor, but what remained remembered. His body remembered the strategy, the stealth. His heart remembered the anger, the righteousness.

He had never been good at walking away from a fight.

The strange thing was the name traveled with him. New city, new country, new language, it didn’t matter. He would stay in a place until he felt the need was settled or until restlessness drove him on, and they whispered of him. Ghost. Fantasma. Mátoha. Призрак. Spøkelse. New place, new need, same name.

He had tried a few times to just… not. He’d gotten a second chance at life, sort of, so maybe that meant he was supposed to try something new. He would try to cobble together an existence where he was and block his ears to the needs around him. That existence was never much—he was still, in a way, nothing more than a homeless teenager with no identification, no home, no family—and yet it could have been the start to something. He had been homeless and adrift before. But the attempts never lasted long.

It was always the kids that did him in. Little kids crying from hunger, cowering in dangerous homes, or watching dead-eyed from a street corner. Sometimes _little_ meant truly little, young ones who should have been too busy playing tag or watching _Clifford_ to shed a tear. Sometimes it meant kids his own age—what he had been, what he should be. He wasn’t sure what he was, but he rarely felt young anymore, and the faces he saw felt a lifetime behind. As much as he did try to live a civilian life, or as close as he could get to living, someone would catch his eye, and he would tell himself _Just this one. Just this once._

Or sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he didn’t think at all, and it wasn’t a face that drove him but a need of his own. He was so tired of feeling cold and empty. Fire didn’t warm him. Food didn’t fill him. But anger did. And if injustice was the kindling, then action was the match, and he could burn and burn and burn. When that happened, he left sooner rather than later.

 _Stay,_ he had pleaded with himself more than once. _You can’t go to him, but he could come to you. He’d find you. He always does._

A hope. A lie. An impossibility. His actions brought too much attention, and attention would lead to discovery, and he couldn’t… They wouldn’t… He couldn’t think about how that encounter would go. Not as he was. So Jason traveled and Ghost followed. Or Ghost traveled and Jason followed. He was never completely sure. He wasn’t sure how it would end. If he ran out of places to be, perhaps he would circle around to the beginning and start the circuit anew. Maybe he would face a need that was too big, too dangerous, and it would finish him at last. He wasn’t sure if he _could_ die again.

So he traveled. And he remembered. He crept from dark corner to dark corner and swept them clean, pushing others into the light. He kept out of reach of the al Ghuls, who were still looking for him in their methodical, spider-legged way. And he tried to keep Gotham far from his thoughts.

It was a newspaper in Prague that undid him, a little English language circular for expats that brought news from home. He might not have known otherwise. America, though so important to itself, rarely saw its local disputes and trials aired beyond its own borders. The world had its own worries. The disappearance of a local vigilante wasn’t worth the ink. But this newspaper, written for Americans wistful for home, bothered to make note, though it was hidden seven pages in, tucked amid articles about rising oil prices and celebrity gossip already stale and forgotten.

The words grabbed Jason like a gauntleted grip of the chin. He paused in stuffing the toes of his shoes and uncrumpled the page, pressing it flat on the warped board floor to smooth out the wrinkles. There wasn’t much else to learn. The Bat Man had vanished from Gotham a month ago. The League had issued no official statement, nor had any of the other members disappeared around the same time, so there didn’t seem to be a mission underway. He was just… gone.

Jason had a lone 50 koruna in his pocket, one he willingly slapped onto the sticky formica countertop of the internet cafe before pushing through the cigarette-heavy haze to a computer in the back corner. The employee didn’t look up, just shivered over her phone and leaned away. The lights flickered as he passed. He squatted on the stool, leg bouncing anxiously as the boxy machine hummed and whirred. A month, he tried to tell himself, was not very long. And the paper had been old, its ink already fading when he had snatched it from the abandoned box. Everything was fine now. Even if something was wrong then, surely it was fixed by _now_. He’ll take fifteen minutes of the allotted hour, do a quick scan of Gotham news, and then go back to his life. Because everything was fine.

Everything was not fine. The mysterious vigilante was still missing, now two and a half months after the last sighting. Crime was rising in Gotham, on all levels. The rogues were testing the waters, emboldened by a lack of response, but the garden variety crooks were starting to creep back in as well. Jason gnawed on his bottom lip as he scrolled backward through the digital archives and multiple Google tabs. The pain was a brief flash of light before it faded, too, into the background with the room around him.

He didn’t understand what he was seeing. Reports of the Bat Man were always difficult to parse without context. Batman worked hard to make sure he was difficult to pin down. Even official media was forced to rely on rumors and supposition much of the time. But this time, beyond the wild speculation… a void.

Two and a half months ago, Batman. Then, suddenly, nothing. Or rather, no Batman. There was _something_. There were disasters. An explosion in a commercial building. A raging inferno on the docks. A car bomb downtown. None were linked, as far as Jason could tell, but all happened in the same week. And after that week, Batman was gone.

That could be explained. Secret missions. Undercover work. An injury. There were reasons. Except Bruce Wayne was gone, too. ( _Bruce. Bruce._ ) The official story was business overseas. Except there were no maintained appearances. No unrelated reports of major busts in another country by a shadowy figure. No Bruce at all, or even the carefully constructed absence of him.

Batman, gone. Bruce Wayne, gone. And Gotham devolving into darkness.

Time ran out. Jason slapped another coin down, one he could ill afford to spend. He dug. And again found nothing. The computer froze, fritzed, then flashed blue. Jason rose and tried to shake the stiffness out of his limbs as he left. The stiffness faded after a few blocks’ walk. The unease did not.

He shivered and tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves as he faded back into the twilight.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It was the smell that hit him first. That was what people said, wasn’t it, that smell was the sense closest tied to memory? He had thought that wrong. So few things in his travels had triggered a memory, but they were usually sights or sounds or sometimes nothing he could define at all._
> 
> _Gotham smelled like steam._

It was the smell that hit him first. That was what people said, wasn’t it, that smell was the sense closest tied to memory? He had thought that wrong. So few things in his travels had triggered a memory, but they were usually sights or sounds or sometimes nothing he could define at all.

Gotham smelled like steam. Not clean ocean air, though the city squatted like a toad on the banks of the Atlantic, but like the muggy, dank air that rose from sewer grates and subway vents. The smell—not just steam, but garbage and urine and rust and other things he couldn’t name—all muddled together into something uniquely, horribly, quintessentially Gotham. It invaded him as he slunk from the cargo ship, crawling like a slug up his nose and into the twitching mass that was his brain.

Jason staggered, but made it safely to dry land and the deep shadows of the harbor before he stumbled to his knees. The smell was nothing he could have described in any real way to another person, likely not something he had consciously noticed in his first life, but it was unmistakable. This was home. He—

He lost time. The sunrise, pale and muffled by the early morning smog, had just been glimmering across the water as he slunk from the ship. And now it was night.

Where was he? He had been picking his way off the docks and now all he could see was sky, sunless and flooded out by the light haze of the city. He was numb, empty, like there was just a frame to him, like his insides were still filling in. Jason gripped the edge of the brickwork, relief shuddering through him like pins and needles as the rough rock bit into his skin. He could feel that. Good.

He blinked at the sky and let the pieces swirl around him, reorienting like constellations in a planetarium. He wasn’t looking up at the sky. He was looking out. Jason blinked, grip tightening further, then looked down. Gotham sprawled below his feet, blinking lights, far-off shouts, and muted car horns all drifting up like smoke.

Maybe the thing about smell was a lie. Because the smell of Gotham had ripped him free and sent him spinning, sure, but now, looking out, he almost felt like he could remember. It was like rifling through old photos, looking at faces that would age into people you could recognize but that you couldn’t name quite yet. There was a tall, skinny building to his left, pencil-thin and sleek. Beyond it was an older building, squatter and shorter but still many stories tall, with ornate concrete edging near its peak. A sliver of green park. A curving arch. They had names he couldn’t remember, stories he couldn’t recall, but they felt familiar.

How much time had he lost? A whole day? Two? More? Where had he gone? Why did he feel like it hadn’t been just his mind missing, but his whole self?

Jason shoved that thought down, way down where the other things he didn’t want to acknowledge rested. He needs to focus. He had a reason for being here, back in this city he thought he’d lost. But he was the one who felt lost. Because Gotham made him feel like Jason, and Jason Todd was dead.

_Focus. Don’t slip again. **Focus**._

He needed to be fast. Batman—it was easier to think of him as Batman—was somewhere in the city. Or information about where Batman actually was would be. That was all Jason needed, to prove to himself that there was no danger, no mystery, that Batman’s disappearance was all part of a larger plan. Once he had that, he could leave and return to the numbing familiarity of his cycling purgatory. He could slip back into being Ghost.

_No metas in Gotham._

Jason looked up sharply as a shadow loomed in his periphery. A gargoyle, hunched and worn, leered out over the city, its eyes blank and unfocused. He knew this one.

“Bogart,” Jason breathed. At last, a name he could remember. Muscle memory took over. (For a second time?) Jason crawled forward, over Bogart’s grasping talons, to bracket himself with the gargoyle’s legs. Safe. He felt safe here. Not… not settled, but like he could take a minute to breathe and reorient himself.

Far below, someone screamed. Jason recoiled, drawing his knees up to his chest. His back smacked against the gargoyle’s chest, making him hunch forward more. A second scream drew him forward on hands and knees to peer over the ledge. He could see a smudge in the alley, people moving. He waited, breath caged in his ribs and stoppered by his throat, for a swiftly moving shadow, a flash of cape, a throaty growl.

Nothing.

The scrum of bodies disintegrated, leaving only one, huddled and broken on the concrete. Gotham churned on, and Jason pushed down the unease in his stomach, the same that had been fermenting inside since that day in Prague. Batman couldn’t be everywhere at once. A crime, especially something unplanned like a mugging, didn’t have to mean anything.

So he waited. He watched. Time passed. Days. Nights. A week? Even when he was present, Jason was never fully sure how _there_ he was. He knew out-of-body experiences. This wasn’t that. He didn’t see himself from above, from without. He didn’t want to see himself, the way he was now. It was more like… like sitting in the back of his own head with the cruise control on. He could see himself from within, moving from shadow to shadow. Scavenging for food. Skulking around the docks for crime the capes might have an eye on. Sometimes he slept, but never for long. And sometimes he just… wasn’t there at all.

But neither was Batman.

His time was running out. He could feel it like a weight on his head, like eyes that made the skin between his shoulder blades prickle.

_No. Metas. In. Gotham._

Jason might not be a meta, but he wasn’t whole. He wasn’t right. Something in him was wrong, closer to the monsters Superman faced than anything that would belong here again. And Jason wasn’t stupid or cruel. He knew what chasing him away would cost… Batman.

He needed to find Batman, but he could not let Batman find him. If he kept ambulance chasing, he would get caught. Better to go on the offensive. And Jason would be looking for the man, not the cowl. No need to challenge Cave security. There was a safety in that, and a danger, because it meant challenging the house instead.

A bus took him to the city’s edge, where apartment buildings faded into little suburbs and then into widely spaced mansions with lawns larger than entire subdivisions. It was like a dream, that final walk through the woods and up the hill. He didn’t know the way, that portion of his memory eaten by worms, but his feet remembered what his head forgot.

It was night again, the waning moon half hidden behind the rolling clouds. Jason’s feet never faltered, or at least not any more than they would in the light of day. He was a city boy, uncomfortable in the outdoors, if still competent, but the dark bothered him less now. Owls called to him from overhead, lensed eyes winking yellow from their branches. They sounded like ghosts.

The fence around the Manor property was no more trouble for him that it had been before. He had been a teenage boy here. Sneaking out was well within his skillset, even if Jason suspected Br—Batman had known each and every time he left. The house and the grounds were still. Crickets chirped from the bushes, and a raccoon’s mirrored eyes stared back from the koi pond, but no alarm sounded, no voice called out for him to stop. Security lights lit the lawn in pools, but the Manor itself remained dark.

Jason pushed on, not allowing himself to stop and take it in. The dizziness in his head intensified. He couldn’t afford to lose more time. He moved faster, scrambling up a tree, leaping onto a ledge, then clinging along the side of the house. It was easier than he remembered it being, the stretches from one window to the next less of a struggle, but he pushed the thought aside as well and kept his head carefully empty until he was in front of the window he sought. The drapes were pulled shut, like those in all the other windows he had passed. He couldn’t remember if this was normal or something new.

Jason clung to the side of the Manor, ears straining, but he heard no movement within. That meant nothing, and he knew it. His heart wasn’t pounding. It didn’t do that anymore. But he felt sick, the well of dread pooling in his stomach and growing deeper by the moment. If he left, he would never know. If he stayed, he could get caught. But if he chose nothing, he would drown.

Before he could lose his nerve entirely, Jason retraced his steps around the house and down to solid earth. The front door was never an option, but his hands knew where to find the kitchen door key, how to slip it into the lock with nothing more than a soft click. His feet knew how to follow the diamond tile with nary a squeak through the kitchen and into the hall.

This was home. He was home. And the ghosts were waiting for him.

White shrouds loomed out of the dark. Jason skittered backward, his first sound a gasp caught in the back of his throat. He blinked, swallowed, squinted. Not ghosts. Sheets. The living room was covered in white sheets draped over chairs, tables, sofas. Mirrors, too, which he was perversely grateful for. The dining room was the same. The parlor. The den. The sunroom. Room after room of shrouded furniture and still, musty air. 

Names Jason couldn’t call out hovered on his lips. Where were they? Where had they gone?

Upstairs was the same—empty, silent, still. The halls were lined with closed doors, an honor guard of stoic faces that stared at him as he passed by. Only one door did he open. The room behind it was as empty as the hallway. The drapes were pulled close. The bed was made. There was a fine layer dust on the headboard, the dresser, the photo frames.

Jason placed one hand atop the dresser, then rubbed his fingertips together, as if feeling the dust would make it more real, make it make sense. He had worried about what he would do if they found him. He had never thought to worry about what he would do if he couldn’t find them.

The Manor was abandoned. His family was gone. There was nothing left to haunt this house but him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to audreycritter for talking me down from utterly hating this chapter. 😬

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Ghost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28539315) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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